Food For Thought

I'm just back from the NAMM show in California, and I got to meet loads of people, many of which mentioned they read GT Mag and a few suggested I do an article on sing...

I’ve been reading (and thinking) a lot about the future lately, maybe it’s fatherhood or chaotic state of things around the world at the moment, and the author Yuval N...

Anyone who starts exploring music theory will start to see mathematical patterns in music – they’re all over the place! In this article I’d like to share with you some...

I just put an order in for a new custom guitar with Gray Guitars, and I’m super excited about it - been a while since I bought a new one – at least 18 months! So ho...

A few days ago I have a workshop at the awesome UK Guitar Show, and in it, I explored the various scales (alphabets) of the Blues and how it affects the language (word...

About two weeks ago I had a shocking accident… I pulled down on a newly fitted removable tow bar to check I had pushed it in correctly, and I hadn’t. So out it came an...

In the last instalment, we explored adding in the 9th to degree to a minor chord to get a semitone ‘clash’ between the 2 and b3 scale degrees (2 and 9 are the same not...

Adding in dissonance is a very cool trick for making your chords sounds sweet!

Most of us have things that we know we really should do… little nagging voice in the back of our minds that tell us that we 'can't keep ignoring it… but 'it's so hard ...

There comes a time in most guitar players lives when their practice routine just gets too full - there are too many things that need doing, but there just are not enou...

As guitar players, we have loads of things to memorize – chords, scales, arpeggios, songs, licks, solos… rather a lot, and many hit a limit where things get forgotten ...

There comes a time in most guitarists journey that they decide to take the plunge and 'play the changes' – that is to improvise over individual chords rather than a ke...

Having just sold a couple of kidneys and bought a lovely new acoustic guitar, I was reminded by a YouTube video that a quality instrument does not the great song make!...

I've been listening to the Blues since I first got a guitar and spent hundreds of hours trying to absorb the licks and songs of Freddie King, BB, Stevie Ray Vaughan, T...

Any of you that are regular readers of my column will know how much I waffle on about the importance of rhythm. Some of you might also know that I sell an app called t...

How is it that the great blues masters can say so much with so few notes? How can BB King tear out my heart with just four notes? I can play those same notes, maybe ev...

So let me start by saying that I'm generally speaking a pretty old school kind of guy. Seems to me that back in the day, things were better made, built to last, simple...

Hope you had fun exploring Drop D and Double Drop D last month. We’re only one step away now from Open G Tuning which is a foundation Open Chord tuning and LOTS of fun...

I've loved messing about with guitar tunings since I first heard someone play Brown Sugar (The Rolling Stones) with the correct tuning and being floored by how much be...

In the ''good old days,'' there were filters to the information we received. Guitar players around the world would rely on guitar books, magazines, DVDs to give us adv...

While recording the last, We Came As Strangers album, our bass player Tim Harries coined a marvellous phrase about the modern recording process, which was that the pro...

Probably the most common way people try to reignite their passion for playing is buying a new guitar, amp or effect box! I’ve been guilty of it too, probably there’s n...

Over the 30 years I've been performing as a guitarist I have met many different types of anxiety in myself, people I have worked with, in students and other musicians ...

This column was inspired by a couple of students I met up with recently that has a very similar question which seems to be very common, especially now that the interne...

Developing a fretboard in your mind is an incredible tool that you can use in many different ways. I've found sometimes that 'mental' practice can be sometimes even mo...

Things are going to change. That’s the only thing that is certain. People and things will come and go, and tastes will change as you grow. Don’t be afraid of it. Respe...

I’m hoping you enjoyed last months foray into piano land and that you managed to find a little time to explore the chords, chord progressions and songs that we touched...

I love those misleading ads one sees all over the internet, but for any of you strummers out there with even just a rudimentary music theory knowledge, it is a very ea...

I’m sure most of you know the feeling… you sit down to do some practice, and you find yourself playing the same old stuff, getting bored and frustrated, and it often l...

Now before we get started on this thought stream I must say that I have suffered from severe GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome) for most of my life, I’m not suggesting ...

In this article I’d like to dig into practice “concepts” and why they are so important. The transition from practising things to practising concepts seems to be a mile...

Really learning to get inside the music is becoming a lost activity and one I recommend all musicians get back into for their musical health!

When I was 18 years old and got accepted in the local classical conservatoire I had a lot of stuff I had to study. On top of the classical repertoire, techniques and h...

This month a want to share a little bit of fretboard logic that I discovered a few years back which really helped me unlock the guitar neck. I’d been messing about...

This month I want to delve into the mystical world of ‘playing what you hear’, what it really means, how I think it might work and how you can develop it. So to sta...

Being a first-hand purveyor of online ‘debate’ (and trolling!) one of the more common arguments I see is over ‘feel’ and ‘soul’ of certain guitarists – do those who pl...

“Practice what you can’t do, not what you can” is advice I’ve received and given over the years so much that it felt very wrong to question it. But when I had the plea...

While there is certainly no ‘one size fits all’ practice routine, there are some basic principles that can help you develop the best one for you, which is what this ar...